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| Photo from the My Lai photos only years later identifies the "Black Blouse Girl" as a victim of attempted rape by US soldiers. Sometimes killing is not enough.* |
Additionally there are other costs of conflict, the price of reconstructing bombed buildings, ports, roads, and the like, and the diversion of funds from construction or manufacture of needed schools, hospitals, and homes for the sake of weapons, military training, removal of the healthy from the workforce to gather an army, and the resulting disruption of society, families without husbands, fathers, sisters, wives, or mothers, sons and daughters, disrupted education of scholars, grief over the dead, and the burden of care for those who return maimed and disabled. Burial costs vary depending on how much, if any, of the bodies come back.
The Veterans for Peace t-shirt I wear is imprinted with Eisenhower’s warning: “I hate war as only a soldier who has lived it can, as only one who has seen its brutality, its futility, its stupidity.” I question it. Why is the wisdom always too late—always after the fact, as if each generation must discover the truth for itself, unable to learn from its forebears? The objective consideration of the tragedy of a battlefield or cursory review of the accounting proves time over time war destroys more than it saves. Participation in such waste and slaughter is immoral on its face.
Most recently I heard a proud Vietnam veteran defend his involvement saying, “The ten commandments actually don’t say ‘Thou shalt not kill,’ but ‘Thou shalt not murder,’” and further, he said, “I killed many but murdered none.” So to him taking a life in war is nothing to keep you from sleeping like a baby. We didn’t get into the weeds about whether he knew his opponents, whether they were armed, and whether he was in imminent danger, or whether they were men, women, children, infants, aged, sickly, or proven guilty of participating in attacks on Americans.
From my reading of Nick Turse’s Kill Anything that Moves I knew that My Lai was not a one-off event, that much of the killing in Vietnam followed the pattern, “See a gook, shoot a gook.” Free fire zones allowed pilots to exhaust their weapons on whatever villages they flew over as they returned to base—no time for so much as a “How do you do,”—just blast or bomb. Killing is what war is.
The just war principles of Augustine have rarely limited the blood lust actual conflict engenders. The classical clashes of rank-and-file archers, brightly clad fusiliers, were limited to wars on broad plains where such fine points as flanking and advancing on one another on disorderly and smoky battlefields look so quaint to us today as if they were designed for epic films on large screens.
But once these slaughters were decided, the victors turned to the enemies’ towns and villages for spoils—women to rape, food from farms, and leaving burning wrecks of their foes’ properties. It’s been the pattern from ancient times to the present. Recent reports are that the ratios of civilian to military killed have flip-flopped from one of ten to nine of ten in twenty-first century war.
The loosening of restrictions on US military in today’s drone attacks has revised by an inordinate degree whatever caution for minimal killing civilians (collateral damage). Now there is no question of waiting for innocents to clear from a target. Strike if the target is available. Those others should not have been standing anywhere near the enemy.
All this being said, still I am perplexed by how to advise a society under attack by a recognized evil. While I can conclude the killing must be limited only to combatants purely as self-defense, I cannot decide for another not to use violence in self-defense or to defend an innocent, however much I may personally disavow such action.
Regrettably that admission permits the open growth of military establishments, production and stockpiling of weaponry, on the possibility that their use in defensive war may one day be necessary. Yet I know that such developments, taken either by all nations or even by only a single fearful one, increase the likelihood of massive immoral, unrelenting death.
If what I have delineated is truly the case, can we ever eliminate war? I contend that war is eliminated only insofar as each potential soldier refuses to kill. War is eliminated when workers refuse to make weapons. War is eliminated when we beat our swords into plowshares and study war no more. War is eliminated when we realize we are all in the same boat, this singular planet Earth which must serve as home for all of us who are here now and for all future generations. The conviction “I will not kill another” must be grounded in every individual conscience above the dictates of clan or nation.
Instead we must work to reduce fear of the “other.” We can do so by dedicating ourselves to the betterment of life for everyone in the world, not just those we see as our own—those who look or talk like us. We must work to see that every one of our neighbors has clean water, decent shelter, nourishing food, all education for which they are able, medical care, and opportunities to contribute to others through meaningful work.
Only by forsaking our competitive delusions will we eliminate war as a morally acceptable solution to disagreements.
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